Ultimately voters are not ideological in the sense that they wave left and right banners, but they are able to locate parties in terms of the values they hold—which party is the abortion party, which party is the party on law and order—and they make their choices on the basis of that. That is the most important thing we're talking about here.

Allow me this: is it not sometimes a mix, though? I'm not saying this to aggrandize politicians, yet we all door-knock. We all have constituencies and connections with voters. I prefer a voting system in which that connection is maintained.

I'm not against having local representation, but your job is to try to work out the balance. Right now we have an overbalanced sense of the local. People use it to basically try to block every attempt at reform with these overblown ideas of the importance of the local.

You had André Blais here the other day. He did a great study in which he asked people what influences their vote and if they vote on the basis of a local member. Of the responses, 40% said that, yes, local is very important. When he asked a follow-up question on what if that local member wasn't a member of the party they supported, only 4% were now prepared to support that local member.

I welcome the witnesses. Thank you for your very interesting presentations.

I would like to continue with this discussion, Mr. Pilon. In Quebec, studies showed that politicians, such as the member for Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, Louise Harel, made a difference of 3% to 5% during an election, even after thirty years or so in Parliament. In other words, if voters voted 50-50 for the parties, the Louise Harels and François Gendrons in the election would bring in an extra 3% to 5%.

Therefore, this means that the individual members themselves may not contribute too much, but their role is important. In other words, voters do not care all that much about the individuals themselves, but rather they value their connection with whoever will be the member representing them. In Quebec, this is a major problem. We came up against it when we tried to reduce the number of ridings from 125 to 75 to establish a mixed system. In Quebec, the services that the Quebec government provides to the public, in a state of public emergency, go through the constituency office. That is less true at the federal level, because there is a narrower range of files.

I would like to ask you how you see the role of political parties in a democracy.

Well, your question of the role of a political party in a democracy is a very broad question, whereas the lead-up was all about the role of the individual member. I think that the results that you describe are perfectly in line with the research, in that someone who's been in the job for a very long time has been able to build up a public profile.

The studies of voter knowledge about individuals tend to flow from the prime minister to cabinet ministers in the press to people who have been in office for more than 25 or 30 years. That is clearly an important part of it. We have a high turnover of MPs, as you know, in our Parliament, but when we look at the average, the situations that you describe are not as common as we might see in the British Parliament, where people sit for a very long time.

I think the research suggests that the ability of a local member to do local work.... Again, I'm not against having a local member who does local work, but let's not overvalue the role that being local plays in a voter's choice. The bump that someone gets, the research suggests, is maybe 3% or 4% above or below the swing towards the party. The key thing is the swing towards the party.

In fact, despite the weight of the party, a member who doesn't do a good job in his or her riding can be turfed out. We are aware we only have a very short time.

I will clarify my point. Because I was elected, I have a deep respect for the common sense and judgment of voters. Witnesses told us that citizens did not understand much about our current debates, that they didn't care about these issues, and that they felt political parties were too partisan.

Are the experts the ones who should decide on our voting system? If not, we need the means to do so, and that includes taking the time required to achieve our objectives.

Everyone is talking about civic education initiatives, but that is not feasible in eight weeks or even within a parliamentary session. That may not even be feasible within a single term in office.

I do think it's wrong-headed to look at this from a point of view of public education. What do people need to know about voting systems? I often tell people that selling a voting system is like selling a car. People need to know about the performance; they don't need to look under the hood. Very few people look under the hood when they buy a car.

We seem to have this idea that somehow voters need to be electoral officers who can explain the mechanics of a system. Certainly our media is obsessed about that, so I would say, yes, the evidence from previous referendums suggests that if you go the referendum route, you will basically be setting up a situation for it to fail because the evidence that we have from previous referendums is that voters will say, “I don't understand what you're asking me. I'm not an expert in this. I'm just going to say no because I haven't really a clue what's going on.” That's what the results are.

The research shows that people didn't reject the other voting system reforms because they didn't like the options: they rejected them because they said they didn't even know a referendum was going on and they didn't really understand what the issues were.

I do think there is a role for expertise. I think that the combination of partisanship.... I don't have a problem with partisanship, frankly, because I think that in a democracy people are allowed to disagree, and that's a good thing, and parties play a crucial role in mobilizing the public around different issues. However, as I say, the public uses parties as a proxy for their own intimate knowledge. We can't expect them to be expert in all these things. They're busy. They have lives. What they do is they say, “Yes, I trust that party. They seem to be upset about this, so maybe I want some more answers.” By contrast, if the parties are fine with the change, then the voters will be fine with the change too.

I want to start with Professor Rose and I also want to start by thanking all three of you for being with us this morning. This panel will have heard from 20 witnesses by noon, and Madam Flumian is our first female witness since Maryam Monsef.

This is nobody's fault. I was on the steering committee; I helped pick the witnesses. It is what it is, but we're looking at a field in which apparently the experts are dominated by the Y chromosome.

Moving on, Professor Rose, what I wanted to ask is about citizens’ assemblies. I'm not taking a knock at citizens’ assemblies; I think the one in British Columbia and the one in Ontario have been fantastic. However, what I began to realize, as people didn't understand what the members of the citizens’ assembly had learned, was that as a gold standard for public education, it was almost as though you had a group of randomly selected great Canadians who threw themselves into this and cared deeply—as your article suggested, meeting through the summer in closed rooms in beautiful hot parts of Ontario because they care about democracy—and I almost felt as if these wonderful citizens emerged to say, “We have the answer”, and the rest of the public said, “What was the question?”

As a matter for public education, are there drawbacks to a citizens' assembly?

I think you've put your finger on the fundamental tension, the relationship between the assembly and the work they do afterwards. We can, I think, learn a lot from what was done 15 years ago. We can use technology and media to ensure that there is a conversation happening at the same time as the assembly is learning. There are all sorts of technological tools we can use to encourage citizens to learn along with the assembly.

I don't think we did that well enough in Ontario. In British Columbia, of course, they had a reporter who was dedicated to covering the assembly, and it was no surprise that British Columbians knew more about their assembly than Ontarians did about theirs.

In Ontario we had a very difficult time getting attention in the provincial press, for a number of reasons. There's a real tension, because it is independent of government, so it doesn't get the kind of coverage that government does, but the work it's doing is significant to the work of government.

So is there a tension? Yes. Is it remediable? I think it is. I think the remedy is to make sure that the process has a public educational component at the same time.

I want to put this question to each of you, and I'll start with Professor Pilon.

This committee has been struck, with other parallel processes under way for public education. Each member of Parliament across Canada has been asked to hold town halls; the minister and the parliamentary secretary have said they are planning a tour across the country to listen to people, particularly from marginalized groups and groups that don't usually participate with adequate media coverage. This should encourage public education, I would think, even perhaps as much as or more than a citizens' assembly, depending on how much news coverage a citizens' assembly gets.

My question is this: can this committee become, and what could this committee do to become, a tool of legitimacy that could be a proxy for either such a citizens' assembly or some other method of engaging the Canadian public across the board?

We have only a minute and a half for all three of you to answer my question, starting with Professor Pilon.

You already are a tool of legitimacy: you were elected, there were platforms, people broadly understood the different things that were being discussed. I think it is time now to act. There's a higher-order principle at stake.

It's lovely that you all want to chat and have a group hug with the public on this issue, despite the fact that you hardly do it on almost any other issue, but the higher-order principle here is democratic equality. Do you think every vote should count? Do you believe majority governments really should reflect a majority of Canadians? Those are basic democratic values, to my mind, and that is the business you should be focusing on.

I might gently disagree with Professor Pilon and say that I think the public do need to be involved in a substantial way. Your question, I think, is what that looks like, and it is not focused on systems and is not focused, as Professor Pilon mentioned, on the engine, but on the broad principles.

My fear is that as you tour and hear from Canadians, you're going to be hearing from stakeholders, not average Canadians. The challenge of this committee will be to ensure that average Canadians who don't have a vested interest are at those meetings.

You shouldn't do anything that delegitimizes your role as individual members of Parliament. You are a very legitimate tool for having these conversations with Canadians.

In whatever you do, I would be careful, if some of the solutions that are being proposed actually add to fragmentation, that you do not create a bigger problem by adding more fragmentation. You have to get to the question of what the basic issues are and then deal with those, because it is a governance ecosystem. Changing one thing may or may not have an effect on other things. You need the broader perspective before you can home in on some of the individual aspects.

For example, we've heard some testimony, but I would say, from all the information I have, that Canadians strongly support attachment to their local MPs and to their constituencies. I would hazard a guess that if we checked your files, which I once did in another life, we would find that you have more than four percent of Canadians in your constituency phoning you about problems that they expect you to help them address. I would bet that for a fact. That is a better connection of the roles you play in that function.

I have to say this has been one of the most exciting panels we've had so far, and I want to thank you for your frank comments and excellent testimony today.

Professor Rose, we heard a little bit about the guiding principles, but more focused on a voter-centric approach rather than looking at it from the eyes of parliamentarians. I think, as committee members, that we need to be mindful of that when we're talking to Canadians, when we're talking about what those guiding principles are—for instance, effectiveness. Effectiveness from whose perspective? From our perspective or from their perspective? Is it simplicity from our perspective or from their perspective? I think there are going to be conflicting responses depending on who the audience is.

I liked to see if you could elaborate a little bit more on that, because I think that's one part we haven't actually touched on. We have conflicting ideas: parliamentarians versus voters. I'd like to get a little more understanding from your part on that, and then I have another question. Could you elaborate, please?

I think that the guiding principles of the committee, and presumably the guiding principles that will help you in your cross-country tour, are very broad, and in some cases, as I mentioned, they are really about products of a system. You can't have a discussion about those because they're a consequence. In thinking about what citizens want, I'm trying to encourage you to think beyond those five principles that were given to the committee. Other studies have taken a broader approach to that. Things like simplicity, which is reflected in your accessibility principle, are important. Things like voter choice, which experts don't highly value, are important among citizens.

There was a great study by David Farrell and his colleagues that asked experts around the world to relate what principles are important and to link them to systems. They found that experts actually are not as good as the two assemblies in Canada at linking the principles to the systems. In other words, experts can tell you what is important in terms of the final system, but they're not clear in relating those to those foundational things. I think if you want a system that does what you think it should do, then you need to have a good idea of what those fundamental values are.

I'll go to my next question. We have Madam Flumian, who's talked a little bit about the importance of civic education, and then we have Professor Pilon, who said that Canadians don't want to see what's under the hood, so it's a little bit of conflict. We've heard from other testimony that we're not doing a good enough job in terms of educating Canadians about the importance of the civic process. Since we've been hearing testimony to the contrary, could you elaborate a little bit more on why you feel that Canadians don't need to know more?

Because they don't know anything anywhere, right? Do you think that the Irish voters know the weighted inclusive Gregory method? Do you think they can explain how STV allocates its representation? No, they can't. Neither can our voters explain to you how 39% of the vote turned into 60% of the seats. Just go out in the street and ask them. They're not going to be able to tell you. That's the simple system. We know they mistake actual legislative majority governments for other majority governments. The public's knowledge is low, and that's because they're busy. Your job is to be the experts and call in the experts as you need them.

The important thing is that the Irish, as an example, know how to use their system. How do we know that? Ballot spoilage in Ireland is actually lower than in our system. We could intuit that if they didn't understand the system or if it was too complicated, as the critics allege, then we would expect to see lots of spoiled ballots, but we don't. Therefore, they understand how the system works and they understand what to use it for, and that is the important thing. You're wasting people's time if you go into all the details, because they glaze over. You have to connect with them on why this issue matters. That's the broader question behind how a democracy should function.

I say majority rule and effective representation. Those are two pretty key values that I think any democratic theorist would get behind.